Tips for Evil Characters
It seems like some good/evil conflict is necessary for the welfare of RP, without it to provide drama we're pretty much stuck with Bronze chatting, grinding, and screwing. All things that can be fun, but tend to lack much depth. Now depth and drama can be gotten from relationships, but only a finite amount. Eventually a relationship stops being new and becomes comfortable and there's only so many times someone can cheat before it becomes a bit silly they're still together. It seems like the onus for creating good/evil conflict is on the evil people, which is very unfair to them. I can't really see a way around it though. Personally I try to occasionally run events against evil people or drop RPaffects etc that I think will be interesting but it's very rare when I can come into a circumstance in which my character actually would do all that instead of just trying to kill someone. Conventional wisdom is good bad guys are made by stuff like events, tmaims, rpaffects etc, and while those're all good I don't think they're the key. Because they're all rather exhaustible, eventually everyone runs dry on event ideas or just can't be bothered sitting down to write them out. What you really need is an evil character that wants something from other characters (good or evil really), that's renewable. The list I came up with is basically this. Blood, sex, life force, suffering, humiliation, money. I'm sure there's more though that's just off the top of my head. They can go about getting this through physical means, although it's almost always cooler and more interesting if they do it through RP means possibly supported by force. That is using manipulation, blackmail, intimidation etc. For instance, say I'm playing a vampire who wants blood. I see the person I want to bite and on the most basic level beat them up in the street, rp biting them, leaving a tmaim or two about the bite marks. This is pretty good, it's renewable, your character constantly wants blood so you can do it to different people or even the same people with different variations. It's RP and much more interesting to everyone involved than a trip to the hospital/demon spa. What would make it better though is if instead of doing that I incapped your friend, or even a random innocent and traded their life for that person letting me bite them. Similar result but the method is more complex emotionally because the person is contributing to their own suffering in a way. Or if I was really scary I demand they let me bite them or they'll die. Or tell them I'm really a good vampire and I need to feed from them so I don't feed from innocents and maybe kill them etc. Or if I want misery, that is I enjoy watching people suffer. You can get it through straight up torture, incap someone then cut on them. Again not terrible, particularly if handled well. But again being sneakier is cooler, using a hostage to get someone to submit to torture, or to torture someone else. Or intimidation or trickery will yield a more RP based and fun result. I think almost always the less physical and more mental/emotional the better, even a character that likes inflicting mental or emotional suffering would be cooler than one who just likes inflicting physical suffering. What you pick isn't important, and as I said I'm sure the list could be extended a lot. It just has to be something you want regularly, that's renewable, that comes from other players, that they don't want to give you. I'm not saying all evil people should do this, or even that good people shouldn't. But I do think some people doing it, of both alignments though it's likely easier for evil to justify, would markedly raise the quality of the RP in the game. Make their characters cooler and scarier, and not be too difficult. It doesn't require a huge amount of effort or creativity really and it'd be nice if the characters had things to deal with and discuss in the game apart from who slept with who behind who's back. Category:Roleplay Category:Guides